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With every chapter, Gargantua serves up a concentrated dose of commodity images, most of these glossy and seen on a screen.* Under
Stallabrasss direction, the commonplace artefacts of our daily lives
impose themselves like actors in a technological drama. The computer
screen perched on desk or lap, captures our gaze and focuses our concentration in ways that no previously existing office technology ever
achieved. For instance, a typewriter imposes itself as a physical reminder
of work to be done; and it shapes the typists body, mental, and perceptual apparatus to fit the task. But it does not absorb the eye as does the
computer whose screen dances with a hypnotic space saver. Nor does a
typewriter impel us to work as does a computer whose menus and files
dictate choice as an obligation.
Like a giant contact lens, the screen has become a necessary prosthesis to
visual and mental functions. And we dont relegate it to work alone or
leave it in the office at quitting time. Instead, we bring it home for
amusement and for works after hours seepage into domestic life.
Computer games are marketed for fun, hence they are all the more fascinating and compelling. Actually, the fun belies the instrumentalization
of the gaze and the assimilation of everything that presents itself as random to the implicit program. The erasure of spontaneity progresses
apace as the game player hones hand/eye coordination. Amidst the
panoply of ever more slick and life-like game figures, Stallabrass bids us
recall the sketchy and imperfect ur-figure of video gaming: Pac Man.
The equivalent of Mickey Mouses Steamboat Willy, Pac Mans movements were halting and jerky. He could hardly be taken for real. By comparison, Stallabrass points to todays technologically advanced games
and game settings whose approximation of reality is only apparent in the
fact that the militarized superheroes never seem to have to bury the bodies of their slain victims. I, too, appreciate those moments when texts
reveal themselves as texts, when imperfections and disjunctions point to
the fact and features of their production. But we shouldnt be too quick
to resurrect antiquated video technologies as sites for critical leverage
into todays culture. As my students point out, many eighteen and
twenty year olds develop nostalgias for the technologies of their not
long distant youths. They collect Pac Man, Star Wars action figures,
even 8-track country music tapes. And they dont necessarily use these to
* Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua. Manufactured Mass Culture, Verso, London 1996, isbn
1859849415, 40 hb, 1859840361, 13 pb.
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develop critical insight into the objects they now consume. As Jean
Baudrillard suggests, nostalgia represents the desire for difference at a
time when any sort of distinction between past and present has already
collapsed.1 Thus, my students tend to describe themselves in terms reminiscent of the Silver Surfer. They glide across Netscapes and game sites;
and slide in and out of chat rooms. They plunge into the virtual; and they
tell me that they chart their own trajectories like twenty-first century
De Certeauian superheroes. Indeed, they see their prowess at resisting a
games program as a far more radical act than De Certeaus description of
pedestrians whose walking patterns cut the corners of the citys grid.2
Im sceptical of so much hubris. But, then, I dont play computer games.
Like a dinosaur of the pre-technological planet, I cant abide sitting nor
can I force my attention onto a screen.
But I agree that for a great many people in the United States and Europe,
the screen dominates the visual field and influences perception.
Stallabrass makes this abundantly clear when he suggests that the computer screen has the power to embrace, and in so doing assimilate to its
aesthetic, all other sorts of screens that pre-date the computer: most
notably, the television monitor and the automobile windshield. This line
of reasoning is analogous to the proposition in economic theory that once
capitalism came into being it redefined all concurrently existing modes
of productionincluding slavery and serfdomaccording to its market-driven logic. Similarly, television once had a life in a different cultural order. Initially viewed as a curiosity that brought six inch high,
black and white people into middle-class homes, it supplanted radio and
redefined auditory consumption as no longer primary, but ancillary to
the visual object. However, now, in the post-computer domestic setting,
television is an unremarkable site for talking heads, drama, and mayhem.
It plays to an often absent audience of ambulatory image consumers who
move from snack to snack and screen to screen.
Apprehending the home and office dominated and crowded with
screened images is nowhere near as disturbing as Stallabrasss reckoning
that the embrace of the aesthetic includes our last enclave of freedom: the
automobile, whose windshield is yet another screen. Ive spent the weeks
following my reading of Gargantua obsessed by the way my cars windshield frames the landscape and gives it back to me on its bug-encrusted
pane of glass. Towns, cities, farms: all have a four foot span; and like a
televised image, their denizens take on the quality of figures in a news
broadcast.
A World Become Disney
Frame and screen articulate the visual and the commodity form. Overly
abundant and densely omnipresent, the visual commodity object stuffs
us full like a society of greedy Gargantuas whose food is simulacra. What
we see and how we see it is part and parcel of consumerism. Stallabrasss
scrutiny of images portrays the diversity of our world collapsed into the
homogeneity of the visual commodity object. He produces a disturbing
1
2
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sentation. Even the real world seen through a clear glass windshield,
shop window, or screen has a way of being psychically coloured and
fetishized by the very glass which reveals it.5 How do we break the
fetishism of the visual commodity? Morse reminds us there is a heterogeneous world of local values outside the scope of the screen.6 Perhaps
these haunt local expressions of trash and graffiti. But, she, like
Stallabrass is hard pressed to suggest how these local values might penetrate the disengaged ambience of consumer distraction.
To break the zombie spell of distraction, Stallabrass summons up a version of Brechtian estrangement that occurs whenever the stifled and
glutted First-Worlder travels to a part of the world less richly colonized
by commodities. His account of a train voyage from Bucharest to
Munich and his description of the streets of Havana have the effect of
lifting the bemused reader out of the commodity aesthetic and demonstrating that it is itself a localisable phenomenon.
Of course, theres always the Brechtian effect of natural disaster. I happened to read Gargantua during the week following Hurricane Frans
romp through North Carolina. Six days without power or water produced a more dramatic estrangement than a trip to Bucharest or Havana.
Stallabrasss evocations of computer graphics, tv, malls, and the world
seen through the windshield had for me the quality of science fiction. In
my world, fallen trees blocked practically every road. Many cars lay
smashed where they had been parked. Malls were either flooded or closed
for lack of power. And every screen in town was blank. For a week, tvs
and computers cluttered domestic space like a bunch of vestigial toes
reminiscent of a highly advanced society that was no more.
I cite natural disaster not as a solution but as an example of another way
of looking at our world. The culture that engulfs us is altogether precarious. The necessary technological and economic infrastructure that supports it is as simple as its manifestations appear to be inviolable and
complex. Too often our work as critics is determined by the objects we
study. In a world dominated by the commodity, we search for instances of
rupture, phenomena that penetrate the glossy image, or practices that
disrupt fetishization. It might also be useful to bear in mind that this
world is produced, and that fetishization bespeaks the contradiction of
its dependence on maximizing the accumulation of wealth and resources.
We need not wait on Mother Natureor even acts of sabotageto
demonstrate the fragility of a system whose slick images are financed by
speculation and gambling and fuelled by ever dwindling resources.
5
6
Ibid., p. 203.
Ibid., p. 213.
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